The Nvidia chips include 1.4 billion transistors running at speeds up to 1.6 GHz. "It's one of the largest chips in mass production and unlike some processors it is not 60 percent cache," said Keane.

Nvidia is continuing to push GPGPU (Nvidia Tesla) systems for technical computing using graphics chips. The company is launching two board level products for such high-end apps, including a four GPU system in a 1U-sized rack-mounted device that delivers up to 4 TFlops at 700W. It sells for $7,995.

Nvidia is updating its year-old Cuda development environment that helps programmers modify C programs to exploit parallelism. Cuda now supports all major 32- and 64-bit operating systems and includes a number of parallel algorithms and tools. On the road map for Cuda is support for Fortran and multiple GPU systems and clusters. Nvidia is also working on support for C++ and a hardware debugger.

Simulation of a single neuron involves 200,000,000 differential equation evaluations per second, requiring approximately 4 gigaflops. A neural array engaged in sensory processing requires thousands of neurons, thus, the detailed simulation of neural systems in real time requires more than 10 teraflops of computing power.

AMD says its 4850 device at about 110 W and $199 will deliver about 75 percent of the performance of Nvidia's high-end GTX280 which costs $649 and dissipates 236W. AMD will claim technology leadership in two areas. Its chips will use more than 500 cores, more than double the 240 cores on the new Nvidia parts. They will also use GDDR5 memory interfaces running at about 3.2 Gbits/s or more. Nvidia will use the existing GDDR3 protocol running at up to 1.1 GHz on a 512-bit interface to deliver memory bandwidth up to about 102 Gbytes/s on some versions.

Because memory bandwidth is not increasing as fast as processing resources on the latest Nvidia architecture, some applications may find they are memory bound, said Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at Nvidia.

Bergman said the AMD focus on a more mainstream design will enable it to roll out this fall a version for notebook computers that consumes less than 70W. "There's no way this new Nvidia core will be in notebooks this fall," Bergman said.